The production of red blood cells from stem cells (in particular human pluripotent stem cells (hPSC)) has been the subject of growing interest in the scientific community during recent years. This is in part, driven by the increased difficulty in obtaining sufficient clinically safe blood from donors to sustain global transfusion requirements.
Despite the increased interest in generating stem cell derived red blood cells there has been little progress made to take the early research discoveries towards the clinic and several major obstacles to RBC differentiation remain. Specifically, these are i) the efficiency of stem cell differentiation, ii) production of definitive as opposed to primitive erythroid cells, iii) sustained amplification throughout the differentiation process and iv) enucleation and terminal maturation of differentiated cells.